As Ireland’s largest dedicated conference and events venue, Killarney Convention Centre has been attracting Irish and international corporate events for decades. The entire Conference Meeting Venue is a 4,500 square metre location, and has two conference hotel properties on-site, which provide 500 bedrooms and another 2,000 bedrooms within a one mile radius. The venue hosts over 220 Irish and international meetings, conventions, business and entertainment events each year, and providing reliable, high-performance wireless Internet access has become a key requirement.

Clio O’Gara, Business Development Director at Killarney Convention Centre explains, “In today’s 24/7 environment, Wi-Fi access is becoming ever more important for conferences. In fact, it has become a necessity. We were receiving a huge demand for wireless access in order to stream conferences live, enable attendees to reliably check their emails during conference breaks, stream video presentations, and provide easy online social media interaction during events.

“With those kinds of broadband demands to fulfil, we absolutely needed to upgrade our current network to a better, more robust one that provided reliable, high quality Wi-Fi access in a high density environment.”

“After looking at several different solutions, Ruckus was the obvious choice,” explains Shane Hartigan, Director at Integrated Media Solutions. “Ruckus access points have a sleek form factor, the best antennas, react to live changes within the RF environment, and require minimal IT support. It suited the needs of Killarney Convention Centre perfectly, providing it with a real solution, which the Centre’s sales team could be confident would provide the kind of performance their clients demand.”

The installation included 96 Ruckus ZoneFlexTM 7982 high performance 802.11n access points (APs), which were deployed in just 2 weeks across the entire Convention Centre. A further 65 Ruckus ZoneFlexTM 7372 high performance 802.11n APs were installed in the adjoining Brehon Hotel, which were deployed within a week. These APs feature patented Ruckus BeamFlex™ adaptive antenna technology, and the network utilises a Ruckus ZoneDirector™ management platform to centrally control and monitor service delivery and performance. The network was deployed and is operated by non-wireless experts, and was installed quickly and easily through a point-and-click web-based wizard. With Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi, any organisation with limited IT staff and budget can create a robust and secure multimedia WLAN like this one in an equally short timespan.

“With Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi deployed throughout Killarney Convention Centre, even when it is fully booked, the staff are quite comfortable in the knowledge that their upgraded network will now support everyone well. In addition, through the easy-to-use functionality and feature set, their IT department can be empowered to provide personalised services, such as setting up private networks or confidently supporting live streaming in a high density environment like the Convention Centre,” concluded O’Gara.

“Killarney Convention Centre wants the best ROI from their wireless system and a solution that is future proof,” explains Hartigan. “With Ruckus, Killarney can enable Hotspot 2.0 functionality and take advantage of the location based services that Ruckus offers, like SPoT™, making it one of the most advanced wireless systems that we have deployed to date.”

Since the system was installed, Killarney Convention Centre has not received a single complaint about Wi-Fi, and the sales teams feel even more confident of winning business from international brands to use the Convention Centre for future conferences.

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